LETTER FROM
THE EDITOR
HUFFINGTON
01.27.13
Future
Forward
N THIS WEEK’S issue,
Bianca Bosker looks at
Siri — not only what
Apple’s “humble personal assistant” can do for us,
but also how it was initially envisioned, and what it might become.
As Bosker writes, the story of Siri
is part of the largest artificial intelligence project in U.S. history,
funded by the Defense Department to equip a virtual assistant
with human-like reasoning and
learning abilities. It’s the story of
a scrappy, innovative startup acquired by the world’s largest tech
giant. And it’s a story rooted in
the belief that cutting-edge technology can lift us into a higher
ART STREIBER
I
state of living, “by freeing us of
the irritants and drudgeries of life
that keep us from pursuing our
more serious interests.”
Tracing Siri’s development,
Bosker places it in the larger but lesser-known context of
artificially intelligent assistants,
from early phone-based assistants
like Wildfire to Microsoft Office›s
much-mocked Clippy. And she
lifts the veil on years of infighting over what Siri should aim
to do, as well as on the charges
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